1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the technical field of an electrooptic device such as a liquid crystal device and an electronic device having the electrooptic device.
2. Related Art
Liquid crystal devices, one example of electrooptic devices of this type, display images in such a manner that the orientation of the liquid crystal molecules between a pixel electrode and an counter electrode disposed on a pair of liquid-crystal holding substrates, respectively, by application of a predetermined voltage therebetween.
Electrooptic devices of this type may have the technical problem of causing defective orientation of the liquid crystal molecules due to a transverse electric field (an electric field parallel to the substrate surface or an oblique electric field containing a component parallel to the substrate surface) which is generated between adjacent pixel electrodes on the substrate according to the difference in potential between the pixel electrodes. When such a transverse electric field is applied to an electrooptic substance such as liquid crystal, to which a vertical electric field between the pixel electrode and the counter electrode facing each other is to be applied, abnormal operation of the electrooptic device, such as defective orientation of the liquid crystal, occurs, causing the problem of light leakage at that part to decrease the contrast.
An example of means for solving such a problem is a liquid crystal display disclosed in JP-A-9-61855, which has a source line extending in parallel with the orientation of the liquid crystal molecules to reduce the transverse electric field in the domain in which defective orientation is caused. There is also a method of improving the response of the liquid crystal when displaying moving images to make it hard to see defective orientation.
This type of electrooptic device can cause afterimages and tailing (a phenomenon in which the image of a moving object persists to have a tail and thus gets blurred, and thus a smooth moving image cannot be displayed) by the influence of the transverse electric field. More specifically, when the electrooptic devices are driven, display problems such as afterimages may be caused by the reverse tilt of the liquid crystal generated by the unbalance of the orientation of the vertical electric field generated between the counter electrode and two pixel electrodes corresponding to the counter electrode and the orientation of the transverse electric field caused by the potential difference between the two pixel electrodes and the generation of an area in which the liquid crystal is oriented in undesired directions in the pixels. This leads to an increasing need for the technique of decreasing reverse tilt by reducing the transverse electric field so as to display high-definition images.
Another request for this type of electrooptic device is to improve the contrast, that is, to prevent a decrease in contrast caused by devising the planer shape of the pixel electrodes to reduce afterimages and tailing as much as possible.